Ten days after Virginia’s governor left office in January 2014, he and his wife were indicted on 14 counts of corruption, accepting bribes and obstructing an investigation.
At one time, former Gov. Robert “Bob” McDonnell was considered a Republican rising star and was Mitt Romney’s potential running mate in the 2012 presidential election. But by January 2015, McDonnell had been sentenced to two years in prison after being found guilty on 11 of those counts.
TV stations that Gannett owned then — especially WVEC-TV, Hampton-Norfolk, Virginia, and WUSA-TV, Washington — were crucial partners in covering the federal indictment and subsequent separate trials of both Bob McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, in Virginia’s capital of Richmond. In daily coverage of the trials and other important court developments, my role often was to take the tweets from broadcast reporters and immediately fashion them into stories online so the reporters could concentrate on video for their evening newscasts.
I’ve chosen to highlight this coverage not only because it shows how I’ve helped keep readers informed on long-term developments, but also because of the wealth of background material that allows readers who want more to stick with usatoday.com. I made the pieces easily accessible on a story page with a timeline of links to the continuing coverage, a Twitter list (now outdated) and documents.
A postscript not evident in this material from four years ago:
Bob McDonnell and his wife, who was sentenced in February 2015 to a year and a day for her indiscretions, never spent time in prison as their appeals worked their way through the courts.
The Supreme Court threw out his conviction in June 2016 and sent the case back for a potential retrial, which prosecutors decided not to pursue. A federal appeals court put Maureen McDonnell’s sentence on hold because of the high court’s ruling in her husband’s case.
In November 2018, Bob McDonnell filed for divorce from his wife of 42 years, and it’s unclear as of March 2019 whether the decree had been made final.
The link to WVEC-TV’s coverage became inoperable when Gannett’s TV stations became TEGNA and changed content-management systems.
